Is this a Celeron or a Pentium III? 466MHz is 466MHz no matter how you label it, and the Celeron 466 delivers a level of performance never before seen in the "under $200" CPU price segment. Even though the Celeron has one quarter the amount of L2 cache as the P3 has, it still holds its own in the gaming arena as most of the benchmark results clearly indicate its parity level against Intel's fastest and most expensive desktop CPU, the P3-500.

All is not wine and roses for the Celeron 466 however, it still suffers from the same maladies that all Celeron processors currently do: No SSE instruction support and relatively slow handling of the system's main memory via its 66MHz front side bus. The latest patch to the synthetic 3Dmark99MAX we received allows optimization and testing for SSE instruction equipped CPUs to be displayed, that's the reason for the large gap in favor of the P3-500 in the results for that test. Also, ZD's CPUMark99 tends to favor larger amounts of L2 cache for its testing, hence the P2 and P3 CPUs always have dominated the Celeron line (hindered by their meager 128Kb of L2 cache) in that test.

Right now Celeron owners can scoff and laugh at the Pentium3's high price tag and seemingly "useless" instruction set benefits. In the next three to six months however, particularly with the arrival of the SSE-optimized Quake3: Arena, the thought of eating a rail gun shot due to some 12-year old punk who owns a P3 CPU that runs the game 20 - 30% faster than your Celeron system can is somewhat sobering.

Still, the Celeron 466's performance level is impressive as all get out. Factor in its lightweight $160 - $190 price tag and you can see why Intel has been gobbling up lost marketshare in the low end of the PC market the past four months.